Highlights of TM Forum Smart City InFocus 2017 in Yinchuan, China

Yinchuan is intended to serve as the blueprint “smart city” for more than 200 cities across China. Here are the highlights of my trip.

Despite living in Beijing, China for 10 years (2003-2013), I’d never paid attention of Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia province in China until I joined Cyberview, a tech hub enabler and Smart City builder for Cyberjaya.

We were sponsored by the Ningxia government to participate in their annual Tmforum Smart City conference which was attended by more than 500 delegates from 64 countries.

Yinchuan is intended to serve as the blueprint “smart city” for more than 200 cities across China.

At the City Hall which serves more than 13,000 people a day, a form of hologram – not people – greeted residents.

In order to speed up approval of various applications, only one stamp is needed compared to 26 stamps which were previously used.

The public trash bins are powered by solar, and encourages the community to recycle by rewarding points that can be traded with services or daily necessities.

The bins send out a signal when they’re full, so garbage collectors know when to empty them.

Residents can order raw fish or meat via an app on their phone and, rather than wait at home for perishables to turn up, they can pick up their shopping at centrally located refrigerated smart lockers.

The central government of China tries to move 250 million of its citizens from rural areas into towns and cities by 2050, therefore they are building mega cities which are efficient from scratch to cater for population influx.

Yinchuan has a population of 2 million people but the city can cater for up to 4 million people.

A blank canvas like Yinchuan can give more flexibility to adopt new technologies, in which the government is hoping that it can attract people that would otherwise have gone to Beijing or Shanghai.

I’ve compiled the photos I took and made a small video of the visit on my Facebook below:

During the 3 days conference, we met the people behind smart cities around the world, and we are already working to build partnerships that can benefit Cyberjaya and Malaysia’s future smart cities.